Social Items

Instagram new feature now makes it possible for you to request to join someone’s live stream, while watching it, and if accepted, you can start broadcasting live along with the host. It already allow anyone streaming live to invite a friend to join, but the new feature now lets you initiate the request.

The feature invariably shifts the possibility for collaboration to the guest, and as allowing them to place a direct request to host, will actually enable more people to participate in a shared experience.



Instagram, however may need to put in place a screening system that would let the host verify the guest and if inappropriate content is shared, be able to boot the offending guest.

Albeit, the issue of someone sharing inappropriate content when they join, isn't any different from allowing random people to comment on your web contents.

But the ability to see pending requests, will allow the host pick a suitable fan to join the live stream rather than at random, or even someone with an insightful comment in the chat could be chosen from the request list.

The possibilities for collaboration will be greatly enhanced, as the feature rolls out, and may mean more interaction on the social platform. Just imagine what it will feel like for the fans “taking calls” from a celebrity, or exchanging pleasantries.

Instagram makes it Possible for Users to request to join Live Stream



While smart speakers like Amazon Echo were initially labeled as “crazy,” “weird,” and as “not very useful” - consumers calling it “pointless” because virtual assistants already existed on the phone, and talking to the room seemed frivolous.

Now fast forward to present day, with smart speakers in the home, you'd just talk and get an audible response or actions (like turning on the heater). And the consumers are gradually realizing that they really need the virtual assistant-powered smart speakers.

The smartphones can’t possibly replicate the “smart speaker capabilities,” despite the hands-free options available; when a smartphone is in the pocket or purse, you can’t just talk to the virtual assistant.

Thus, the Amazon Echo became a runaway hit, now emulated by the industry’s biggest technology companies.

Nowadays, consumers are gradually realizing they don’t want to be without virtual assistant-powered smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo line, Google Home and Apple HomePod.

The growing dependence on the “smart speaker behavior” of just talking when you need an action performed in the home, will make you want to crave for it. And the next few years, will see these smart speakers joined by hundreds of wearables that also give instant access to the virtual assistants.

With the AI infused wearbales providing extra security, and eliminate vulnerabilities in voice authentication.

Then the growth of AI wearables and the demonstrated ability of secure voice ID means the convergence of a future where the virtual assistants and wearables are the “killer apps” for the smart home.

Why the Future of Virtual Assistants is Smart Home; not the Smartphone



Twitter following outrage from users on handling cases of abuse, have rewrote its user guidelines, as part of a broader effort to tackle trolling and abuse, and to make sure users know what’s allowed on the networking service.

While the company hasn’t been clear about how it penalizes users — as a formal policy, it never commented about individual offenders, and its punishments have been rather unnoticed.

The company has published new details outlining all of the different types of punishments meted out on defaulters, albeit many users aren't aware of the many different techniques Twitter uses to try and keep people in line.

From obvious unnoticed, the punishments ranges from use of algorithm to show your tweet to fewer people, and to the rather rash lifetime ban on the service.

Twitter’s enforcement strategy is that it uses a number of data set to determine the severity of punishment to dole out. And one of the major contributing factors is how newsworthy a tweet is, which requires subjective analysis.

It also looks at other criteria like who reported the tweet, and if or not the offending user has a history of abuse or harassment on the platform.

And based on severity of offense, Twitter can temporarily lock you out of your account until you verify your identity — using either a phone number or email, which eliminates the possibility of anonymous trolling.

Twitter verifies notable users of public interest so that you know you’re hearing from the real person, not an imposter. The company, now is saying, formally, that it can take away the verified status if a person violate the company’s rules.

Twitter Guidelines on Penalty for Nasty Tweets or messages

Brookings Institution, a century-old American research group in its Metropolitan Policy Program, reported based on a study that in the last decade an increasingly broad range of jobs requires employees to work with computers on a daily basis.

While those highly digital jobs have seen higher productivity growth, as such, such jobs requiring more tech proficiency also pay more.

The Brookings' report analyzed changes in the digital needs of over 500 occupations covering 90 per cent of the workforce in select industries from 2001 - 2016.



For workers in highly digital occupations, the mean annual wage range reached $72,896 in 2016. While those in mid-level digital jobs earned $48,274 and the low-level digital jobs were paid $30,393.

And all these earnings can’t be explained away by just academic qualification: in respective of the worker level of education, computer skills still brought in a premium wage — one that’s almost doubled since 2002.

The more savvy you are with a computer affects your salary in jobs far outside computer science fields.

According to the report, Agriculture and construction jobs have the least level of digitization and lower pay. While Finance, insurance and media are among the industries that require the most tech ability, and saw some of the highest growth in digitization in the last decade.

Why Jobs requiring more Tech proficiency pay more?



Before now, Instagram users on mobile web could only view Stories, which have to be created in the native app. But starting today, mobile web users can post to Instagram Stories, though the use of Instagram’s augmented reality masks or videos sharing isn't allowed.

While videos and the rest of Instagram’s creative tools like doodling, stickers, location tags, polls, and more are still restricted to the native app.

But users can snap photos, overlay text captions, and share them with friends from mobile web, as well as Save posts they find in the feed.

The company intends to improve more on the creative tools, and the restriction to native app stems from the fact that it might be awkward posting vertical portrait images from a landscape mode, albeit there's no confirmation if photo posting will come to the desktop.

In the next few weeks, users will be able to find a camera icon in the top left corner which they can tap to shoot or upload a photo for their Story. On tapping the bookmark icon on feed posts sends it to the Saved folder that’s accessible from the top right of the screen.

They can also add text and change the text color. When they’re done, post it to Stories by tapping “Share to Your Story”.

Instagram Stories will definitely receive a boost, and as competitors are hugely digging into the creative feature, it could potentially lock into the developing world audience through the mobile web.

Instagram brings photo-only posting to Stories on mobile web



While Amazon's Alexa is notorious for third-party app support features, Google is now towing same line as it woos more developers on-board, with slew of new features to incentivize the community.

Google's step towards making Assistant a better experience, includes: a new push notifications, daily updates and additional language support.

The speaker-to-phone transfer capability is perhaps the most compelling of the new features, and it's possible via a new API that can start an action on a Google Home speaker and complete it on the phone. And the updated version of the Cancel command enables the app to send a polite farewell before logging off.

The API enable apps to send important updates to users on the phone, while the Google Home speaker support is still coming in the future.

For "Families badge" is also a new feature, which designates if an app is okay for the little ones and have support for additional languages, including Spanish, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese.

All this is coming on the heels of the recent Google addition of a number of new features to its Smart speakers offerings, along with the Pixel Buds, which have already started shipping.

Google Assistant gets tones of Third-party App support features



While Google's machine learning proprietary system, TensorFlow is now a core part of its commercial products like Google Voice Search, Google Photos, and YouTube, the company has shared the developer preview of TensorFlow Lite targeting mobile devices.

First announcement at Google I/O back in May, TensorFlow Lite is built from the ground up for mobile devices.

The company says it's an evolution of TensorFlow for mobile, as it's aimed at creating a more lightweight machine learning solution for smartphone and embedded devices.

TensorFlow Lite also supports the Android Neural Networks API, with emphases on a lightweight product that could initialize quickly and improve model load times on a variety of mobile devices.

Albeit, this is the developer preview, so isn't the full release, there’s still much more to come as the library is further expanded.

For now, TensorFlow Lite is tuned and ready for a few different vision and natural language processing models like MobileNet, Inception v3 and Smart Reply.

It’s currently available for both Android and iOS app developers, so developers can take a spin into the TensorFlow Lite now.

Google targets mobile devices with TensorFlow Lite

The Android system in the effort of making specific features or functions easier for people with disabilities to use, allow developers to access core components via the Accessibility services.

While many developers take advantage of the powerful API to enhance the functionality of their apps, which quite often aren't aimed at helping disabled users.

And there are over a thousand of such apps in the Play Store that add, enhance, and tweak functionality to make the Android experience much better.

But an imminent change from the Play Store terms could put an end to it all, Google is preparing to shut down universal access to its accessibility services APIs within the next 30 days, according to a report credited to Android Police.



The report claims that mails were sent out to a number of developers, that apps using accessibility services which are not explicitly being used “to help users with disabilities use Android devices and apps” may be booted from the Play Store unless the functionality is revoked.

This shutdown may actually impact Android users' experience, as there’s high probability that many of their favorite apps uses accessibility services to enhance functions.

Albeit, your favorite apps will not lose their functionality, but it does present some difficulties.

Google warns that “repeated violations of any nature will result in the termination of developers account, and investigation and possible termination of related Google accounts.

Google's imminent shutdown on Accessibility Services APIs permission



While the iPhone X’s new form of device security, Face ID has been touted as the ultimate flagship, it has naturally become a target for hackers. A Vietnamese security group, Bkav claims to have cracked Apple’s facial recognition system using a replica face mask that combines printed 2D images with three-dimensional capabilities.

Bkav pulled this off using a consumer-level 3D printer, a hand-sculpted nose, normal 2D printing and a custom skin surface designed to trick the system, as contained in a video proof.

Apple on its part, appears to be pretty skeptical about the purported hack, as there are quite a few ways the video could have been faked, the obvious would be training Face ID with the mask prior to attempting the unlock.

The company, as if in anticipation of such maneuver, had quipped that Face ID matches against depth information, and isn’t available in print or 2D digital photographs. As it’s designed to protect against spoofing by masks or other techniques through the use of sophisticated anti-spoofing neural networks.

It doesn't really matter whether Apple Face ID "learns" new images of the face, since it will not affect the claim that Apple Face ID is not an effective security measure.

Bkav claims to have applied the strict rule of "absolutely no passcode" when crafting the mask, and to give a more persuasive result, given that Face ID will take additional captures over time and augment its enrolled Face ID data with the newly calculated mathematical representation.

The questions remain that no one knows how legitimate this purported hack really is, and the iPhone X would have locked after just five failed trials to unlock using Face ID, but it’s unclear how many times Bkav made an attempt.

Additionally, the Face ID is attention-aware and recognizes if your eyes are open and looking towards the device, thus making it more difficult for someone to unlock your iPhone even when you are sleeping.

The group, however did not share its findings with Apple, albeit no official statement has been made acknowledging or rejecting the claims by Apple.

How Apple's iPhone X Face ID was beaten by a mask

Microsoft's next major update for Windows 10, codenamed Redstone 4, is set to arrive early in 2018, with the latest Insider build 17035 doing away with “sneakernet”, now replaced by a feature called “Near Share” plus a phone-like auto-suggest feature for text typing.

While the company have already started bringing new features via the Redstone 4 update, it's expected to be a much bigger upgrade compared to the earlier Fall Creators Update, and will bring back some features like Timeline which was rather cut off from the Fall Update.

Meanwhile, Windows Insiders have been trying out the new OS update, and some of it's notable features, such as: Near Share, a new Audio settings menu, and the ability to configure bandwidth.



What is Near Share and How does it work?

Near Share is a handy feature that makes it possible for your PC to seek out nearby PCs and offer to share a file. It makes it pretty easy to just haul out a USB key and copy a file over, replacing Bluetooth, and shareable to just about any medium, through email, Facebook, and more.

To get started, it's currently available with Insider build 17035. Once installed, then you’ll need to turn Bluetooth on, making sure that the “Near Share” button in the Action Center is toggled on. Next, every time you see the “Share” icon, you’ll have the option to share the file or URL with a nearby device.

Ability to Configure Bandwidth

The Insider build 17035 extends the Fall Creators update function that allowed you to adjust the bandwidth used by Windows updates, basically different from downloads you started, like apps you downloaded from the Store.

Instead focusing on major things, many Windows users are preoccupied with rather unnecessary bandwidth consumption from rarely used app download such as games.

Other stuff includes: the main Audio settings ability to set Windows sounds, and so forth has been migrated into the Settings menu, out of the Control Panel. And the touch keyboard now includes a couple of improvements, like a new “Acrylic themed" background, as well as extending support to over 190 new foreign-language layouts.

Additionally, there's now support for text suggestions from the Japanese-language AI chatbot Rinna, which will suggest phrases as you type. But, don’t expect same function to be extended to American users anytime soon.

A Peek into Microsoft's Windows 10 Redstone 4 update

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